In short, webmasters are claiming that they will post content and it would take seven full days for Google to index the content and rank it in the search engine. I can't seem to replicate this on any site that I run. But there are several webmasters complaining about the issue.

Is it possible that this type of behavior is some sort of penalty? Can it be a delay based on data center issues? Can it be an indexing bug on certain types of sites or code sets?

There are many examples of URLs and domains claiming they have this issue in the Google Webmaster Help thread.